However much havoc the lately devalued American dollar is causing on markets all over the world, it is certainly distressing manufacturing industries in Canada.

For instance, a major western Canadian printing company I have had dealings with for many years is suffering mightily. As the Canadian dollar declined down to the 70-cent [U.S.] level five years ago, the company’s pricing structure became ever more attractive in the United States. As its export business soared, it invested in high-cost sophisticated equipment and vastly expanded its staff as well.

Within the past few months, all this has radically changed. As the Canadian dollar climbed first to reach par with the American, then to top the American by as much as 10 cents, the effect was to raise my friend’s printing prices accordingly. A job that had sold for $70,000, now sold for as much $110,000. Customers deserted him in droves.

Much the same thing must be happening to every Canadian manufacturer whose business lies largely in the U.S. This cannot bode well for the Canadian economy, particularly in the manufacturing centers of southern Ontario and Quebec.

At the same time, the price of American printing fell accordingly, and the Free Trade Agreement between the two countries meant that my printer friend’s Canadian customers likewise began considering shifting their orders to the south where they could come back duty free.

Canadian automobile retailers have a similar problem. Even when the Canadian dollar was low, it was sometimes narrowly profitable to buy a car in the U.S. and import it into Canada, because American retail prices have always been substantially below Canadian.

Now, however, the differences are startling, and the rumors surrounding them more startling still. One model pickup truck that costs $65,000 in Canada is said to cost only $42,000 (Canadian) in the U.S. The Chrysler 300-C, selling at about $52,000 in western Canada can be had in the U.S., so the story goes, for $38,000 (Canadian). The Jeep Patriot 4-by-4 SUV running from $28,000 to $30,000 here is offered there at $22,000 (Canadian).

The fee for bringing the vehicle back into Canada is $206.70. Canada Customs warns, however, that not all new vehicles on sale in the U.S. meet Canadian standards. It publishes a list of non-acceptable models on its website.

Stories abound of Canadians from the Yukon and the Northwest Territories, where prices are higher still, organizing family excursions to Las Vegas, where they buy a car or truck and drive it home, saving a net $10,000 in the process.

Canadian dealers, some of whom admit they’re feeling an exodus of customers, fight back in a number of ways. Some say they will not honor the warranty on American cars, a dubious threat untested in court. American dealers have customarily honored the warranty on Canadian vehicles that require service in the U.S.

The manufacturers also warn American dealers near the border not to sell cars to Canadian residents, another rule of doubtful efficacy since most Canadians have kinfolk in the U.S. who would be happy to buy the car on their behalf, then re-sell it to them. In any case, the rule itself would seem in clear violation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Not that anybody would be willing to take the issue that far.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper urged caution last week and allowed that the high Canadian dollar was a subject that required “reflection.” It must certainly be getting much reflection and then some in the Canadian retail automobile trade.

Under the free-enterprise ideal, of course, the Canadian prices should be coming down to meet the American competition. Presumably, if the average Canadian can buy a car for much less in the U.S., so can the Canadian dealer. In other words, they should be doing what my friend the printer is having to do to remain competitive. So far, however, there has been little evidence of this.

Meanwhile, the industry is no doubt on the watch for freelance importers, who buy large numbers of cars in the U.S., bring them into Canada and peddle them here at sharply reduced prices. Rent a vacant lot, put the cars on them, and sell ’em all on one weekend. Nothing to it.

All perfectly legal perhaps, but something the Canadian retail auto industry would not welcome. Even so, how could they prevent it? “Bootleg automobiles,” they might call them, but they would be the same ones that are on sale in the showrooms at much higher prices.

So here’s an investment opportunity for somebody. I’m available as a consultant.

Editor’s note: The November issue of WND’s monthly Whistleblower magazine, titled “HOW GLOBALISM IS DESTROYING THE U.S. ECONOMY” – focuses exclusively on the future of the U.S. economy, and answers key questions like: “If inflation is so low, how come food and energy cost so much?” “What is the ‘housing bubble,’ and why did it burst?” “What’s really going on with the stock market?” “Is America heading into a recession?” “Will the dollar collapse in 2008?” and “What will happen to the price of gold?”

English-speaking Canada was given further evidence last week that an extraordinary change is taking place in Quebec. A whole generation of young people seems to be discovering that the “Quiet Revolution,” conducted in the late 20th century by their elders, was in fact a fraud.

Its pretended aim was to preserve the language and culture of Quebec against the assimilating influence of the Anglo-American colossus that threatens it. What it was actually doing was instituting a secular socialist culture that had far more in common with, say, Sweden than anything in the history of Quebec, and would have been utterly abhorrent to the real Quebecois who founded and developed French Canada.

What would those strictly Catholic mothers and fathers of families with 12 or more children think if they could see their descendants wallowing in the highest abortion, divorce, single-parent and “shack-up” rate in the whole country? Making it worse, this has been done under the guise of preserving French Canada’s cultural past.

In any event, the reality of this staggering hypocrisy is apparently dawning on the generation that is inheriting the sociological shambles their parents have left to them.

The latest disclosure came when Radio Canada announced the “Felix” awards for Quebec-generated popular music. A folk-song group calling itself “Mes Aieux” (My Ancestors) had produced what was voted the most popular song in Quebec. It’s called “D?g?n?rations” which (when spoken) could mean either “degeneration,” an apt description of what has been happening in Quebec, or perhaps just “generations,” a wistful observance of changing times.

The words of the song leave no doubt, however, about its message. They recall and extol the old Quebecois, who courageously broke the land and founded French Canada. The song likewise deplores their descendants who gave it all away and became bureaucrats. Where your great-great-grandmother had 14 children, says the song, “your mom didn’t want any, you were an accident.” Much of it chronicles the woes of women who have abortions.

The song has been a frequent topic on open-line radio shows. But it’s only the latest clue to this social change. There has been much other evidence of it. The current Taylor-Bouchard commission, for instance, which is investigating how Quebec should accommodate religious minorities, has seen a procession of witnesses, many of them young people, bewail the passing of Catholic Quebec. Others view the commission’s hearings quite differently. “The hearings have been a train wreck,” snorts McGill University political scientist Jacob T. Levy. “They’ve provided a juicy opportunity for the most bigoted elements in Quebec society to get a live televised audience for their views.”

The latest government decision to teach “all religions” rather than just the Christian one in the Quebec schools has set off an unexpected protest from Quebec parents.

Most notable of all, a major theme of the rising political party, Action D?mocratique du Quebec, has been the need for the province to connect to its true past. It portrays the province as flailing about, uncertain of what it is doing or why. It is a party of 20- and 30-year-olds, led by Mario Dumont who was born in 1970, when the old Quebec was well on the way to near oblivion. In the March provincial election the ADQ’s standing rose from four seats to 40 in the Quebec assembly.

The English-language Globe and Mail reports with undisguised relief that so far the new trend has not evidenced any notable return of youth to the Catholic Church. Dumont “never lived through the church repression, reactionary politics and cultural isolation” of the 1940s and ’50s, says a Globe opinion piece. “Many, mostly younger, Quebeckers, those who never felt the church’s claws, don’t carry the same baggage.”

It didn’t notice, or didn’t report that last year 10,000 Catholic young people turned out for a rally in Quebec City to further Catholic “evangelism.”

For whatever it’s worth, I do remember those “dark years,” as the now-aging Quiet Revolutionaries call them. I worked on the Ottawa Journal on the borders of Quebec in 1947 and ’48. We had a half-dozen French reporters, and I came to know numerous other French Canadians as well. Nearly all were regular churchgoers, but I can’t remember any as particularly oppressed by “the church’s claw.” They seemed an unusually happy people, had great parties, worked hard and loved singing.

This joy, of course, scarcely describes the moral wasteland of modern urban Quebec, something its rising generation has plainly observed.

Alberta’s tar sands, the last if not the only thoroughly dependable non-domestic source of fossil fuels for the United States and increasingly a principal source of oil for the American market, suddenly last month became undependable.

The Alberta government announced major increases in the royalty rates paid by the companies that extract oil-bearing bitumen from a vast area in northeastern Alberta. The announcement sent oil producers into what one corporate spokesman described as “a state of shock.”

With many billions already invested in existing tar sands plants and billions more in plants under construction, the announcement threatened an abrupt halt to the biggest economic boom ever in Alberta. It also represented the first time in the 60-year history of major oil and gas production that the Alberta government –either deliberately or unwittingly – aroused its people to distrust the industry that feeds them.

Ever since the province’s first major oil strike near Edmonton in 1947, Alberta governments have worked closely with producers to enable the industry to thrive and thereby create the most economically ascendant province in Canada.

This pro-industry provincial attitude was in sharp contrast with that fostered by the socialist government of neighboring Saskatchewan, whose first concern was to prevent exploitation by “Big Oil.” Saskatchewan protected itself so thoroughly that it has seen almost no oil and gas development ever since. Meanwhile, its population has scarcely changed since the 1940s – 831,000 in 1941against 996,000 last year. In the same period, Alberta’s population has more than tripled to 3,350,000.

Now, however, the new Alberta Conservative government of “Honest Ed” Stelmach appears to be following the example set by Saskatchewan. Vigilant against “exploitation” by Big Oil, it appointed a committee to re-examine the royalties it charges on oil and gas. Its five members consisted of one long-time provincial bureaucrat, two economics professors, one high-tech accountant and one lone representative of the oil industry. The committee was chaired by a man who had spent a lifetime in forestry, zero time in oil and gas. After public hearings in which left-wing witnesses demanded far greater exactions from the tar sands plants, the committee became persuaded that Big Oil was robbing Alberta. It produced a report, which if adopted, would have significantly reduced further Alberta tar sands development.

After assuring the alarmed industry that his government would not adopt the committee’s draconian recommendations, Honest Ed announced Oct. 25 what he would do. He would raise the initial royalty paid by new tar sands plants before their capital investment is recovered by as much as 900 percent, and the subsequent royalty paid after capital payout by as much as 60 percent. The two companies that pioneered the tar sands extraction process – Suncor and Syncrude – which thought their royalty rate had been guaranteed by signed agreements until the year 2016, discovered they were wrong. They have been given 90 days to renegotiate their rates, or else!

The initial response of the industry varied from one of somber pessimism to exasperated outrage. Research Capital, much respected for its assessments of the industry’s economic viability, saw some good points in the new policy, insofar as it applied to conventional oil and gas – a simpler royalty formula, relatively low royalties if oil and gas prices were to decline, and continuing incentives for both shallow and deep gas wells.

But for the tar sands, it said that a downturn in investment “could result,” while the treatment of Suncor and Syncrude will have “a negative impact on Canada’s business reputation.” Moreover, it said, the committee report ignored the effects of a declining American dollar, which in the last year had effectively reduced the price of oil paid to Canadian producers by more than 20 percent.

Allan MacRae of Calgary, who played a central role in initiating the new royalty formula that saw vast expansion in Alberta tar sands development, views the government’s decision as a huge mistake. “Alberta’s breach of promises and signed contracts will cost us far more in the future in lost reputation and diminished investment than the hypothetical $1.4 billion gain from the new royalty regime. The new terms ignore the very low rate of return of Alberta oilsands projects – already at the bottom of the pack of global energy project returns, according to DeutscheBank.”

The government’s probable motive for the move seemed even less admirable. Honest Ed won the Conservative leadership last year as a compromise candidate in a standoff between two powerful contenders – Jim Dinning, who represented the Calgary “establishment,” and Ted Morton, who represented the Alberta thrust for greater independence from Ottawa domination. Honest Ed, a distant third, came up the middle and won. Since then, his party’s polled popularity has steadily diminished. He needed to do something spectacular. Well, he’s certainly done that.

Mark A. Noll, the historian of American religion most distinguished for his celebrated book, “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind,” (the scandal being that too many evangelicals don’t use the gray matter God gave them, and many think it wrong to even try) confesses himself mystified of late by a country called Canada.

“What Happened to Christian Canada?” he asks, and that’s the title of his little booklet published this year by Regent College Publishing in Vancouver. It has been widely ignored by the Canadian new media.

It’s more essay than book, and in about 50 pages sets forth some statistics and other information I have never seen assembled under a single cover by any Canadian author.
Some sample facts:

In 1961, only one-half of 1 percent of Canadians told the census takers they were not attached to any religious body. The figure rose to 4.3 percent in 1971 and 16.2 percent in 2001.

After the Second World War, 67 percent of Canadians told Gallup they had been in a church or synagogue over the previous seven days. By 1990, this figure had fallen by nearly two-thirds to 23 percent. Gallup says it’s now less than 20 percent.

In 1961, 90 percent of Quebeckers said they had been to church in the last seven days, and the Catholic Church had one priest for every 500-700 parishioners. There were 43,000 women in religious orders, one for every 115 Quebec Catholics. Today, church attendance in Quebec is the lowest of any province, state or nation in North America.

Now what puzzled Noll was this. Although the histories of Canada and the U.S. have many parallels, religious practice isn’t one of them. Nothing like this has happened in the United States. Where Canada was, if anything, more loyal to its churches in the first half of the 20th century, it now lags far behind, and U.S. church attendance is considerably more than double the Canadian average.

He shows this phenomenon in another way: In 1959, when Georges Vanier was sworn in as Canadian governor general, he began his acceptance speech: “My first words are a prayer. May Almighty God in his infinite wisdom and mercy bless the sacred mission that has been entrusted to me. … In exchange for His strength, I offer Him my weakness.”

Forty-six years later, when Michelle Jean was sworn in as Canadian governor general, she declared that Canadian history “speaks powerfully of the freedom to invent a new world.” She made no mention whatever of the deity. What a contrast her speech made, notes Noll, to the election speeches of both John Kerry and George W. Bush in the 2004 campaign. Both made repeated references to God.

So, what happened to Canadian Christianity, asks Dr. Noll, and for the next 39 pages of his book, he searches for the explanation – searches among the explanations offered by Canadian historians and reaches a few conclusions of his own.

He examines two churches in particular – the Catholic Church in Quebec and the United Church of Canada, both of which have suffered a catastrophic decline in membership. Though the churches are, of course, quite different, he discovered curiously similar explanations.

In Quebec, he finds an explanation in the rise of Catholic Action, a movement that gained great momentum after the Second World War and recruited platoons of talented young people – like Pierre Trudeau, Marc Lalonde and Gerard Pelletier. Its object was to supplant what had become the moribund Catholicism of historic Quebec with a new amalgam of democratic socialism and a reformed Catholic spirituality and practice.

Quebeckers bought the first half of the proposition, but not the second, and people abandoned Christian practice en masse.

Then United Church, created in the 1920s by the union of the Methodists, Congregationalists and most Presbyterians, sought to combine the socialistic reforms of the social gospel with the spiritual message of evangelicalism. This had much the same result. When the government itself legislated the social gospel, the church was left with no message at all.

But all this is an inadequate summation of a brief but very observant analysis of Canada’s religious collapse. If you fear the same thing could occur in the U.S., read the booklet – if you can find it.

One difference between the two countries, Noll does not note. Through much of the Cold War, America defended democracy. Canada did not. People who shoulder great burdens need God. Canada didn’t need God. It had the Americans.

Well, they didn’t, and I am therefore guilty as charged. But where, I wondered, did I get the idea to begin with? I’m ashamed to admit that I picked it up from the Canadian news media.

Why I should have so gullibly believed their version of the American political scene, when I so readily doubt their version of the Canadian one, I cannot explain or defend.

However, this does provide me with an excuse to write again on what Thomas Jefferson (not the Constitution) called “the wall of separation” between church and state.

This concept sits well in the modern secularist mind, whether American or Canadian, because it enables the state to put controls on religion, and thereby evade one specific directive that is very much in the U.S. Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …”

By conferring on the individual a civil right to behave in a manner offensive to religious people, then by using the public schools to ideologically indoctrinate children to “respect” and “accept” such conduct, then finally by branding as an act of “hatred” any criticism of it, the state can effectively “prohibit the free exercise of religion.”

This, in both Canada and the United States, it now fervently strives to do. Its endeavors have made great progress in Canada. Teachers have been fired for daring to criticize – not in school but in public debate – certain sexual practices not long ago regarded as criminal; books have been forced into school libraries over the objections of parents and school boards; Christian schools have been forbidden to prohibit activity they regard as perverted at school dances; newspapers have been prosecuted for running biblical verses denouncing certain sexual practices.

If such despotism does not constitute a prohibition of “the free exercise of religion,” it’s hard to imagine what would. It’s the courts that are doing all this. “Our courts,” as one retired judge told me the other day, “are absolutely out of control. They’re running wild.”

They assure us they’re doing all this to effect the “separation of church and state,” something for which no specific basis can be found in the Constitution of the United States, and even less in the constitutional foundation of Canada, which specifically mandates an educational partnership of the state and the Catholic Church.

This endeavor to erect a wall between religious and state authority is dangerous, foolish and will soon prove impossible. The central activity of the state is to pass laws. All laws, even the most unlikely ones, are rooted in some moral principle. The most obvious, of course, are the criminal laws. Every clause in every criminal code says in effect “Thou shalt do this” or “Thou shalt not do that.”

But civil laws rely on the same kind of moral authority. The graduated income tax seeks to express the principle that those who can afford to pay more should pay more, a moral assertion. The traffic laws seek to provide “fair access to” and “safe usage of” the public streets, but “fairness” is a moral matter, and safety can only be achieved by a code of rules the citizen is morally obligated to observe.

Now, the fundamental source of moral authority for nearly all people is ultimately a religious one. We believe we should behave fairly, honestly, truthfully because the Bible or the Church or the Quran or our pastor or priest tells us so. Therefore, our opinions as to what should and should not go into the law will be religiously grounded opinions, because that’s the only source of authority we have for them.

And when a judicial authority rules, as it did in British Columbia, that a school board broke the law by hearing the testimony of clergymen on the acceptability of certain books, then religion and its adherents are being forbidden to participate in the shaping of the law. Probably 90 percent of the country is being disfranchised.

As this becomes more and more evident, the courts will become less and less credible, a dangerous situation. That’s why the separation of church and state is a very bad idea.

The separation of the church from the state – a principle embedded in the American Constitution, but not the Canadian – is becoming the major issue in next month’s Ontario provincial election.

Much to the disgust of the liberal Toronto Star and to the horror of the atheist Globe and Mail, Conservative leader John Tory has proposed that state funds be made available to non-Catholic religious schools. Since not much else separates the views of the 4-year-old government of Liberal Dalton McGuinty from those of the opposition Conservatives, the issue is dominant.

It’s rooted in the Canadian past. The Canadian Constitution originates as a statute passed by the British Parliament in 1867, establishing Canada as a largely self-governing “dominion” within what was then called the British Empire.

To secure the allegiance of Catholic Quebec to the new dominion, the statute guaranteed state-supported Catholic schools, thereby linking state with church, and Ontario Catholics were able to develop a state-supported independent system.

The public schools were assumed to be Protestant Christian, which in fact they mainly were through the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th. But as theories of education alien to all major religions began to take firm hold of the public system, Protestant Christians began creating their own schools to rescue their children from the secularist indoctrination increasingly practiced in the public ones.

These, however, received no state support. Why not, they reasonably demanded, while Jews, who had long run their own schools and paid for them, joined in the demand. John Tory has adopted their cause and injected it into the election campaign. The McGuinty government says no. In fact, its education minister, Kathleen Wynne, once suggestion that the solution was not to extend state support to other religious schools, but to de-fund the Catholic ones. Thus an otherwise spiritless campaign is rapidly centering on a religious issue.

All of which is very painful and problematic to liberaldom in general and to the Globe and Mail in particular. The most telling argument against Tory’s proposal – that this would mean publicly subsidizing Muslim schools where wild-eyed imams would almost certainly urge young males to donate their lives to Allah by blowing up buildings and murdering their fellow Canadians – could not, alas, be invoked. How bigoted, how intolerant, how insensitive, how illiberal – even if true.

So, if you can’t call attention to the Muslim peril, no matter how perilous, then what peril can you call attention to? Obviously, the Christian peril.

For the Globe, however, this posed difficulties. Non-Catholic Christian schools have been receiving state subsidies in Alberta and Saskatchewan for nearly 20 years. There has been a record of steady improvement in provincial testing results, no doubt caused in part by the competition the Christian schools offered. Any mention of this disconcerting reality the Globe must obviously avoid. So what could be cited against the Conservative proposal?

Globe religion reporter Michael Valpy had the answer. Something called Granville Christian College, an institution started by two religiously fervid “nuns” from the U.S., both Anglicans, who had taken over an old Catholic college at Brockville, Ont., back in the ’70s, and instituted “cult practices,” had closed down two months ago because it couldn’t get enough students.

One former student had set up a website and others were recording their complaints. There had been “emotional abuse” in the place. Some students had been made to get up in the night to be berated for their “sins.” There had also been “physical abuse” (little detail given) and “sexual abuse” (no detail given).

All doubtless very questionable, but a “national” story? Certainly to the Globe it was. For three days running it front-paged what the Globe dubbed “Ontario’s Granville College.” When the daughter of a former staff member added her voice to the complaints, the Globe ran her picture in full color across five columns, with sidebar stories demanding to know why the local press had done nothing, and why the Anglican Church was proposing to do nothing as well.

On the fourth day, perhaps realizing that nobody seemed to give a damn and their newspaper was beginning to look more rabid than the two nuns, the Globe editors finally appeared to give up.

All of which proved what, one wonders. That this is the kind of thing the state would be subsidizing if it funded Christian schools, that’s what. This was, in other words, another instance of a recurring theme. If the Muslims are dangerous, then let’s get the Christians! And why not? They all believe in God, don’t they?

The Canadian news media, so it seems, are finally getting on to a story that broke about 50 years ago, which they missed at the time and have been missing ever since. I know, because I was one of the reporters who missed it.

Judging by the stuff appearing of late in the North American media, we are beginning to discover that our school system has been fairly well ruined by crackpot ideas, introduced in the 1950s by reformers of supposedly unchallengeable authority.

They were in fact challenged at the time by older, life-long teachers who protested that these new concepts were hair-brained, if not downright insane. The changes would assuredly result, they said, in a steady decline in standards, and a whole generation of people incapable of either governing themselves or being governed.

Well, we of the media of that day knew that those old fogies were living in another era. They were incapable of change, out of touch with reality, and fit only to be pastured so that they could not stand in the way of “progress.”

The newspaper editorial writers, as I recall, eagerly embraced the new concepts and urged their adoption. They too wanted their newspapers to be wholly identified with the new society those new schools were intended to create. Little did they know that these wonderful new concepts would result one day in a major decline in literacy and a resulting decline in newspaper readership. They were in effect electing their own assassins.

Many zillions of words have been used to describe this educational revolution, usually attributed to the philosopher John Dewey and the coterie of new thinkers who surrounded him at the University of Chicago. What they wanted was painless education. Above all, learning must be fun, and freed of all sense of coercion and fear.

The practice of pass and fail must be eliminated, teachers must cease being authority figures and become instead friends and guides; examinations must be abolished; grading standards like A, B, C and D and percentage figures done away with. All this was in order to produce a new kind of society in which human evil and competitiveness would gradually disappear.

Those old teachers said it wouldn’t work, that the competitive element in human beings is innate, not learned, and the inevitable result would be a disastrous decline in educational standards.

Every last one of those old teachers is no doubt dead by now, but all through their last years they were forced to watch their forebodings come appallingly true. Too bad they weren’t around last week when kin Canada children and youths went back for another year in school, accompanied by a moaning media chorus describing our educational system as an obvious disaster.

One national newspaper deplores the “social pass” as producing tens of thousands of so-called high school graduates who can scarcely read and write. Another bewails the fact that young people simply are not becoming adults. They acquire one academic credential after another, often living with their parents until they’re 30, and never getting a permanent job.

Now, we’re told, a distinguished psychologist proposes putting most people to work at age 12, with a knowledge of the basic three Rs and nothing more. It will make them grow up, he says. This is hailed as a revolutionary new concept, never heard of before.

In fact, it isn’t new at all. One of those old-style teachers, who died in the early ’50s, was Sir Richard Livingstone, a classics professor, educational philosopher and chancellor of Oxford University. He was Dewey’s contemporary but held very different ideas. Livingstone defined what he called “educable ages” of human beings. We are most educable, he said, when we’re very young, least educable in the teen years and early 20s, and become highly educable again as adults.

He therefore proposed that the high school system be abolished except for the very brightest of students, and that the money thereby saved be directed instead into community schools for adults. People would normally continue their education through their adult life.

In effect, he was abolishing the whole concept of the teenager, the adolescent. If nearly everybody at 12 or 13 joined the work force, they would in fact become part of the adult world. Later they would go back to school as adults to actually learn something and be eager to learn it.

We scoffed at the time. Do away with high school? Preposterous, we said. Today, more than ever, it sounds like a good idea.

A new kind of addiction has become appallingly evident of late in Canada. Whether it has similarly afflicted Americans, I don’t know. But from what traveling I’ve done in the U.S. I would say not.

In Canada, you see the victims of it in business meetings, on park benches, in transit buses, shopping malls, among people walking along the street, even in church – everywhere.

It’s an addiction to water – bottled water. I think of these unfortunate people as aquaholics. Some of my best friends have become aquaholics. It’s shocking, really, to see the effects of aquaholism.

For instance, take this lady I know who sings in our church. She keeps a bottle in her handbag not far from where she stands. As soon as there’s the slightest break in the singing, she jumps back, grabs the bottle, takes a swig, then rushes back ready for the next number.

It’s all very swift, even furtive, as though the bottle ought to be carried in a brown paper bag.

Other aquaholics are more open about it, even belligerent. One of them was talking the other day, bottle in hand, about the American government:

“You know what I think? … (swig) … I think this guy Bush isn’t conservative at all. … (swig) … I think he’s just another damned liberal opportunist. … (swig)… He’s taken all of us in. …(swig)…” It’s an obvious addiction.

Then again, I attended a meeting the other night. There were about eight people there. Three of them – get that, THREE of them – had water bottles. They reminded me of a Holstein herd on a hot day beside the trough. Slurp … slurp. It was very distracting.

Every convenience store now carries half a dozen different brands of water. How can they tell the difference? Is it like wine? Do they sip the water from this place and compare it with the water from that place? Are there good years and bad years? Is there a “Pepsi test” for water? I’m ready to believe anything.

And how do they prevent fraud? What prevents me, say, from buying a truck and a small bottling plant and shipping Edmonton tap water 200 miles south to Calgary as “Essence of the Great Parklands,” then bringing Calgary tap water back to Edmonton – “Nectar of the Canadian Rockies.”

One thing I know. I’m not going to drink any water imported from China, no matter what it’s the essence of.

Who would have thought 25 years ago the day would soon come when about one in every 10 people would be drinking water out of plastic bottles as they walked along the street, and paying up to two bucks a shot for it?

But I can imagine the guy who first thought of it, looking for investors: “I’ve got this great idea, you see, Charlie. I think there’s a product we could persuade hundreds of thousands, even millions of goon heads all over the country to pay a buck or more a bottle for.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“Water! Yes, I said water. You could actually sell bottled water, like a soft drink, and millions of idiots would buy it.”

“And how you gonna do that?”

“Simple. Tell ’em it prevents cancer. Tell ’em it protects against AIDS. Tell ’em it will improve their sex life. Tell ’em if they aren’t drinking five or six bottles of water a day, they’re taking their life in their hands. Tell ’em that every bottle of water they drink adds another day to their life. Tell ’em anything. They’ll believe it. Don’t you know? We’re the most scientifically knowledgeable generation in human history.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means we’ll believe anything.”

“Who’s going to tell ’em all this?”

“Doctors, of course. Medical experts. Informed opinion. You hire doctors to do studies. You tell ’em what the studies are supposed to discover, and they discover it. It’s technical information like this that makes us so knowledgeable.”

We Byfields have a family doctor – by which I mean a doctor in the family. My brother John is a radiologist in Bakersfield, Calif. He’s much more liberal than I, but he does not buy into this water hysteria. I asked him what’s all this about drinking a lot of water for health reasons. He told me that a lot of water is a lot of nonsense. “We doctors know,” he said, “that your body gives a certain signal when it needs water, and that’s the only time you need to drink it.”

“What is this signal?” I asked.

“The medical name for it is thirst,” he said. “That’s the way the body works.”

Ex-Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed, verging on 80 and widely cherished as the grand old man of western Canadian politics, came out of retirement last week to warn that the country is about to face a clash of provincial authority against federal that could tear it to pieces.

Since Lougheed has never been given to excessive alarmism, the warning – delivered before the annual meeting of the Canadian Bar Association?attracted much press attention. Well it might, for the point at issue cuts to the core of the economic deal that brought the Canadian confederation into being.

It also throws into jeopardy the production output of the Alberta oil sands, which are rapidly becoming America’s leading and hitherto most dependable source of fossil fuels.

Under the Canadian constitution, negotiated in the 1860s as a statute of the British Parliament, the provinces, not the federal government, were given control of natural resources. There were only four provinces at the time – Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Soon two more were added: Prince Edward Island on the Atlantic side and British Columbia on the Pacific.

Manitoba gained provincial status then too – at first as a tiny, “postage stamp province” at the eastern end of the vast Canadian prairie. But with Manitoba a distinction was drawn. Ottawa retained control of its resources. When Saskatchewan and Alberta came into being as “prairie provinces” in 1905, the same discrimination applied.

The three “prairie provinces” were established as de facto colonies of Ontario and Quebec, which supplied them with manufactured goods from industries protected by high tariffs. In return, the West sent its grain East to feed and fatten livestock or for export to Britain.

Not until 1929 did the three prairie provinces finally win control of their resources, the privilege extended to the others from the beginning. With the 1950s, however, a great change began. Oil had been discovered in Alberta and with it natural gas in incalculable volumes. When OPEC was formed in the 1970s, astronomically increasing the price of oil, Alberta began a boom, acquiring in the process an unbecoming wealth, highly offensive to the long dominant central provinces. But what could be done? Under the constitution, the oil and gas belonged to Albertans, not to Canadians.

The answer of the Liberal Trudeau government in the early 1980s was the “National Energy Program,” under which Ottawa simply defied the constitution, invaded the province’s jurisdiction and imposed taxes on the resources it didn’t own. The man who defended the province against this onslaught was Peter Lougheed. A secessionist movement broke out in Alberta at the time that drew thousands out to rallies in Edmonton and Calgary. It eventually resolved itself into the Reform Party, later into the Conservative Party, which ex-Reformer Stephen Harper led to power in Ottawa.

But now, Lougheed prophesied last week, Ottawa will use its environmental authority to gain jurisdictional control of the tar sands, forcing a showdown with Alberta “10 times greater” than the fight over the National Energy Program.

“The issue is there front and center, and coming to a head. I think the issues we saw before – and I was involved in many of them – were important. I don’t minimize them.” But “they aren’t even close,” he said, to the coming move of the federal government into the provincial jurisdiction via environmental control.

“My surmise is that we’re going into this constitutional legal conflict soon. This is strong stuff. National unity will be threatened, if the court upholds federal environmental legislation and causes major damage to the Alberta oil sands and our economy.” (That the Supreme Court will uphold the federal authority over the provincial can be regarded as a foregone conclusion. The federally appointed Supreme Court has almost never favored the provinces when a federal-provincial conflict came before it.)

“The government of Alberta, with its acceleration of oil sands operations,” said Lougheed, “will in my judgment be seen as the major villain in all this in the eyes of the public across Canada.”

The chief beneficiaries of this acceleration are of course the American consumers who buy the oil that the tar sands produce, and the people of Alberta who are experiencing by far the biggest economic boom in their history. An Ottawa invasion of the Alberta industry would, in other words, directly threaten the American oil supply. The American government has never bought into the thinking that produced the Kyoto Treaty. The Canadian government has. Lougheed has predicted the consequence.

Macleans magazine, Canada’s oldest, biggest and only weekly news magazine, last week produced a cover story that subjected the Canadian legal profession to the severest public criticism it has ever experienced.

In it, Philip Slayton, ex-dean of law at Western Ontario University and a front-line corporate practitioner, denounced his fellow lawyers for grotesque over-billing, blatant fraud, rank bribery, injustice and even sexual exploitation of clients.

When the Canadian Bar Association wrathfully demanded that Macleans retract the story and apologize, the magazine instead quoted several luminaries of the profession, making substantially the same complaints – one of them on the CBA’s own website – and cordially declined to do either.

In the torrent of letters that poured forth into the daily news media, lawyers bitterly blamed it all on one disaffected member of the profession. Even so, the story seemed to be standing up rather well.

I’ve always noticed that there are two species of lawyers – the big firm guys, and the second floor men in beat-up downtown office buildings or in suburban premises where the square-footage comes much cheaper.

From the big firm boys (and sometimes girls), I have seen some astronomical bills. Their practices, of course, are largely centered on huge corporate clients who no doubt hand out astronomical bills of their own. But if a small client comes in the door, he should walk warily because he will be assessed much the same as would General Motors.

Work that could not possibly require more than rubber-stamp attention comes with price tags that rarely fall below four figures. Moreover, there seems to be a tendency to warn you of legal problems that few would ever have suspected. For the warning, they want $10,000. To protect you against the discerned peril, $100,000 more.

I have been told some big firms in Calgary have introduced the idea of “bonus billing.” Hired to help negotiate some big deal, they present a bill demanding a bonus payment if the deal flies. There is never any suggestion of a penalty if the deal fails to fly. Even worse was the news story that followed the Conrad Black trial in Chicago, in which the two defense lawyers were reported to have demanded an extra $1 million each before presenting their summations to the jury.

But to be fair, I have to add something else about these big firm lawyers. I’ve known some of them to be lavishly generous with their own money. I suppose they could be modern day Robin Hoods, robbing the rich and giving to the poor. Just don’t approach them professionally, if you ain’t rich.

The other species focus in the main on much more modest clients and send out much more modest bills. Where I feared getting hit for $1,000 or $2,000, I’ve seen them come in at half or even a quarter of that. I’ve also benefited from an extraordinary honesty. Again and again they have told me how to avoid legal expenses, thereby discouraging income, much of which would have gone to themselves.

Among them I have encountered some admirable individuals, one in particular. I will not name him because he would never speak to me again if I did. He doesn’t like public attention and responds acidly to all forms of commendation. But the fact is he represented our old newsmagazine for the first five or so years of its 30-year existence without sending any bills at all, and the ones he sent after that were spectacularly low and often never got paid anyway.

Yet he is a lawyer of great capability, saved our hides in a dozen or more libel suits, and repeatedly steered us around major trouble by the unfailing intelligence of his advice.

Now to have this man associated with a profession characterized by fraud, greed, exploitation and cynical manipulation of the legal system is so unfair as to be preposterous.

And yet, I suspect he might endorse in large measure the Macleans’ story. He sometimes speaks wistfully of the law as it was once practiced and no longer is. The old code is gone, he says. Being a lawyer isn’t fun any more. Perhaps Macleans is saying the same thing.

In fact, we’re seeing the same phenomenon everywhere. No society can run without rules. We’ve abolished the rules; we’re suffering the consequences. Why be surprised?